1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to fast methods of updating time weights in a social relation representable by an RDF graph. Additional embodiments relate to updating the saved weight of a relation, and updating a saved time weight of a relation whenever a new reference timestamp is provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprise communication and collaboration typically involves email, meeting schedule, voice, video, chat, wild, blogs, and various forms of documents, such as design documents and bug reports related to products and service offerings. As different organizations adopt technologies at different paces, these rich sets of digital content often exist in different formats managed by different systems that are often not connected to each other. For example, emails between group members may be stored in special format at local disks or email servers. The product design documents are managed by some special proprietary relational database, whereas the project progress is tracked on a separate group wild site. As a consequence, a lot of valuable information is buried in disparate computers that are not readily accessible.
As the number of media types and the amount of digital contents increase, it can cost significant overhead and a reduction in productivity, as users may have to spend extra effort searching for the relevant information. For instance, when scheduling a project planning meeting between several groups, people typically receive invitations in email that have a subject, time and location, a short description, and some attachments and links. If people need to find out more background information about the participants, the previous history of contacts on this subject, or new products related to this project, people have to do searches using several special applications. As every participant repeats almost identical searches to become informed, the productivity of the enterprise is reduced as the number of participants increases.
There has been active research in how to process large scale Resource Description Framework (“RDF”) databases. The focus of these efforts has been limited to efficient storage and retrieval of large datasets whereas embodiments in accordance with the present invention support general computing and inference over the datasets. Furthermore, the approaches have been based on a homogeneous architecture where a set of computers either use a single protocol or form a fixed topology.
REST composition service based approach does not assume any single protocol or topology.
There has been some work on using RDF database to annotate text. But these systems are special cases of proactive search that we propose. In addition, they do not propose a general architecture to support distributed functions.
REST service architecture in accordance with embodiments of the present invention are also different from the conventional 3-tier web architecture consisting of data, business logic and presentation. In the present architecture, the presentation is not consumed by end users but by agents. Unlike business logic that accesses local data, our logic can access distributed functions through service composition.
In an enterprise, people communicate and collaborate on daily basis. These activities form a social network that is dynamic and implicit with rich relations associated with social contents, e.g. email, IM, co-authorship, etc. This implicit social network can be discovered by inspecting the artifacts of these activities, such as email exchanges and authorships of project documents, and so forth. When calculating these relations, a relation with more recent and frequent activities are valued more than one with infrequent activities in the past, as people in the organizations can take different roles over time.
Thus, there is a need for a knowledge agent based approach for enterprise, derived from search technologies. In particular, there is a need for the knowledge agent to efficiently evaluate a temporal aspect of relations in the social network.